


the lindworm

by availedobscurity



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Gen, folktale-ish-free write, i didn't feel like posting this when i wrote it but now i do, is it literal? is it a metaphor? don't worry about it, they're all just kind of mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 07:35:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15068282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/availedobscurity/pseuds/availedobscurity
Summary: a lindworm is born as one of a pair of twins to a queen.it's an old folk tale.this time the lindworm outlives them both.





	the lindworm

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this a long time ago and never posted it, but i'm pretty sure that when i finally get around to listening to the monster's reflection i won't want to anymore, so, take this
> 
> also it's been so long since i posted anything that i accidentally made that the summary at first, my bad on both counts but tbh? using your summary to tell everyone how behind you are on the show you wrote about is a power move

There’s a woman who’s halfway through building herself a kingdom before she decides that she wants an heir. Not like she has anything worth inheriting yet, but she’s been lonely for so long, and that twisted her into shapes that a person’s not supposed to be, and she thinks, someone will have to have my castle when it is built, and the idea of someone taking it without understanding it, of the place being staffed by stewards who take what she makes and assume it all means something it’s not, well, she doesn’t want that. But if she had a kid made of her own flesh and blood, they could understand. She would make them understand.

So she has a kid. She can’t do it herself, so goes and she finds someone to help her. And she meets a witch, and the witch holds out her hands and reveals two rosebuds, one red and one white, and says some weird, archaic, gender essentialism via incantation, but it all boiled down to: make a decision. Eat one, have one kid, there’s your heir. You can’t have both.

But this woman wants both. She wants everything that could be hers. So she has both and she feels something ominous and wrong in the pit of her stomach, but she thinks, well, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel. She wouldn’t know, and she didn’t know how to make anyone understand when she asked.

Anyway, that wasn’t how it was supposed to feel. Her first kid slithers out of her, and then the second, and neither of them are a boy or a girl and that’s all fine, she ate both of the damn blossoms for a reason, the problem is that one of them isn’t human. He would be, if he had the choice. Or, no. If he had the choice she would have made a decision and stuck with it and it wouldn’t have been him, but it’s too late for that by the time he has the words to explain. And for a while, they all go on pretending that this is normal, and a person and a scaled, clawed serpent can be brothers, and a decomposing shell can be a parent, but it’s not normal, and they can’t be brothers, and she can’t be anything but herself, and she wants nothing more than for him to be gone, so he goes, and he hides, and he pretends to be human around the people who don’t know he’s not.

But he pretends a little too well, because the human one dies of being too like the creature that lives in the sewer, and the creature who lives in the sewer survives, and that’s where the whole story goes off-script.

The wrong one died first, was the thing, and there wasn’t any justice or fairness in that. So the thick-skinned creature tries to undo it, but he’s not a person, he’s a monster, too, and they all figure it out, slowly, one by one. He knows they hate him for it, and he knows they’re right to. All the ones who stick around just haven’t put the clues together yet, and if they’re that oblivious the protection of some crawling mole-like beast might be preferable to whatever they can provide themselves.

It all goes on like this for a while, the monster trying to justify why he’s still alive and still a monster when his existence is all just a mistake made decades ago, and why he has to have a life that is a constant reminder that there is another universe split off from this one where he doesn’t exist and things are better there, and everyone who’s been devoured by the things his mother made him be is still alive and well and making things good, without him.

And then another monster calls, another draconic thing pretending to be human, and of course he can tell but it’s nice to have some company. It’s… really nice, to have some company. So they follow each other around a while, figure each other out, and then get each other cornered.

Except the first monster, he’s so used to dealing with people now that he forgets that a long, thin, clawed creature can slip out of a pair of handcuffs so easily, and later he reaches into his pocket and he finds a note. _It comes off, you know,_ the note says, and the first monster doesn’t understand what he means until he sees a sparkling jewel-like sheet of scales in a pile in front of him.

And the first monster, he doesn’t want to be like this, he doesn’t want to be anything, so he gives it a try (one).

It doesn’t work. Or, it does work, but not enough. There are more scales, underneath. It’s just more scales, and now everything feels a little more. The hardness he’d built up on the outside is less now, and he’s terrified of what that means, and he tries not to think about this creature who looks like him in a way he’s been searching for but never found.

Places on the outside of him hurt now in a way that they never hurt before, and he vows not to remove another thing from himself, no matter the trickery.

The other monster comes back, and he is brighter, more beautiful than the first remembered, and he says, _You’ve removed a skin. It becomes you,_ and the first says, _Don’t get used to it,_ and the other shrugs and peels a skin off right there. _It would be best if you followed my lead, don’t you think?_ he asks, and the first monster says, _No,_ but the other looks so much freer, so much more comfortable now that that night he tries again before he can even think about it (two), and this one hurts even more and he thinks he feels blood trickling down, and the next time the other sees him he is taken aback, then pleased.

And the other monster removes another layer of skin. _You don’t trust me,_ he accuses when the first hesitates to do the same, and the first stops his hands and hard claws where they were itching towards the fluttering feeling in this new unfamiliar layer, and he says, _No. I don’t._

Both of them keep the scales they have until a creature worse than either of them has the other monster, three layers of skin down, in her grasp, and she will kill him, they both know she will kill him, and he stands in the middle of sand and wind and puts a gun to his own head and says, _Not without him,_ and when they are forced into a car driven by something they are more afraid of than themselves both creatures notice that the first monster’s scales are peeling and splitting off him like a sunburn (four).

There are more scales underneath, of course. There always are, and maybe there always will be.

The first monster, he knows that he has to keep his skin on after this, because every layer gone reveals places he didn’t know he was vulnerable, and he cannot be vulnerable, he is keeping someone alive, keeping someone as well as he can, but the stress of it all is loosening their scales already. They both shed layers of plated armor just by being there (five-six-seven, each one feeling like it could have just as easily been a death), and when the worst monster, the one who chose not to be human, is elsewhere, the other monster looks at him, and says, with such a deep sadness in it that it hurts more than anything else that has been done to him, _You still don’t trust me,_ and it’s true, and the other tears another skin off himself right there and it hurts so much to look at him. The second before the first monster loses consciousness he is sure that the other one has the shape of a person to him, somewhere beneath all of that shining plate The first wonders if maybe he does, too.

He’ll never know, he thinks, because the other monster is gone, and left him like this, feeling more than he knew how to in the hands of someone who would let him die the second his usefulness was gone, and he should have just shot himself and saved them all, it would have been better (but he never would have known that maybe there was a person beneath all the scales, and maybe that was better too - no).

Except the other monster comes back, and together they tear the terrible creature’s human skin off her body, and the first monster pushes the other out the door and faces death and a layer of skin and scale tears off in the doorway (eight), and this one feels like nothing at all. It feels right, even, to know that he could have been a person, if he lived.

But he does live. They both live. Because the creature thought she understood the kind of monster she was, but she only knew pictures, only pictures and stories and the explanations she made for them herself, and not-understanding killed her. The other monster is so relieved that he can’t say anything about trust or idiocy, they can only hold onto each other, both the most beautiful things they have ever seen, and they drag themselves, scale and teeth and claw so much softer now, to a hospital, scattering plates from their skin as they go (nine).

That night they peel the skin off each other. _They say you have to take off ten layers of skin. You bathe them in milk, and wrap them in shifts, and hold them until the morning,_ the other monster says, and the first says, _Sounds like a waste of milk,_ and the other laughs, and the first says, _No, really, stuff’s expensive,_ and the other laughs harder and says, _We have plenty of time to find an alternative if you’re so opposed,_ and they pull each other into bed, bleeding and raw and utterly vulnerable and all they can do is try to make each other feel something other than the horrible feeling of nothing between their bodies and the air, and they fall asleep wrapped in sheets and each other’s arms.

The first monster wakes up first, before the sun, even, and he looks at the other, lit by moons and city lights, and he is not a monster. He is the loveliest person he has ever encountered, beautiful and asleep and arms wrapped around him.

And he looks at himself and sees scale and claw and he is a serpent still, and he tries to pull them off in a panic but it hurts more than anything has ever hurt him before, so he stops.

When he leaves he is raw and bleeding, and he has never lived in the world this way. He sits in the dark and waits for his body to grow itself new layers of bony horrible plates, stronger and harder to tear away than the last. _Once you get back to ten,_ he tells himself, feeling the sharp edges emerging from the places where he is most raw, _it'll all be just like before._


End file.
